Rozka or Ruzka Korczak (1921,

Płock Płock (pronounced ) is a city in central Poland, on the Vistula river, in the Masovian Voivodeship. According to the data provided by GUS on 31 December 2021, there were 116,962 inhabitants in the city. Its full ceremonial name, according to the ...

– 1988) was a Polish

partisan Partisan may refer to: Military * Partisan (weapon), a pole weapon * Partisan (military), paramilitary forces engaged behind the front line Films * ''Partisan'' (film), a 2015 Australian film * ''Hell River'', a 1974 Yugoslavian film also know ...

leader during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. A

Polish Jew The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the lon ...

, she served in the

United Partisan Organization The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye ( yi, ; "United Partisan Organization"; referred to as FPO by its Yiddish initials) was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during ...

(Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye) and, alongside

Vitka Kempner Vitka Kempner ( he, ויטקה קובנר; 14 March 1920, Kalisz – 2012) was a Polish Jewish partisan leader during World War II. She served in the United Partisan Organization (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye) and, alongside Rozka Korczak ...

and founder

Abba Kovner Abba Kovner ( he, אבא קובנר; 14 March 1918 – 25 September 1987) was a Polish Israeli poet, writer and partisan leader. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to ...

, assumed a leadership role in its successor group, the Avengers (

Nokmim Nakam ( he, נקם, 'Revenge') was a paramilitary organization of about fifty Holocaust survivors who, after 1945, sought genocidal revenge for the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. Led by Abba Kovner, the group sought to kill si ...

)--the only known undefeated ghetto uprising in the history of the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

Early life

Korczak was born in April 1921 in Bieslko, to a cattle dealer. Her family moved to a small village in Płock where she attended public school. In eighth grade, she organized a Jewish student strike to protest Anti-Semitism in the school. As a teenager, she joined a Zionist organization called

HaShomer HaTzair Hashomer Hatzair ( he, הַשׁוֹמֵר הַצָעִיר, , ''The Young Guard'') is a Labor Zionist, secular Jewish youth movement founded in 1913 in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary, and it was also the name of the group ...

(the young guard).

During World War Two

During the

invasion of Poland The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...

by Germany in 1939, Korczak fled to Lituania and met

in Vilna thanks to ''HaShomer HaTzair''.''Women and War: A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present'' - Bernard A. Cook - Google Books
/ref> Upon Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, she co-founded the

(FPO) with

and Kempner in 1942. They smuggled weapons into the

Vilna Ghetto The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland. During the approximatel ...

and smuggled Jews out. As the situation worsened in the ghetto, she left it in September 1943 with the last group of fighters passing through the sewers and took refuge in the forests of Rudninkai and Naroch. After the liberation of Vilnius by the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army (Russian: Рабо́че-крестья́нская Кра́сная армия),) often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after ...

in July 1944, she and her companions focused on helping Jewish refugees and emigration to

Palestine __NOTOC__ Palestine may refer to: * State of Palestine, a state in Western Asia * Palestine (region), a geographic region in Western Asia * Palestinian territories, territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely the West Bank (including East ...

. She arrived there on December 12, 1944.Ketty La Rocca. Rozka Korczak Biography
(in English)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Korczak, Rozka 1921 births 1988 deaths People from Płock Polish emigrants to Mandatory Palestine Israeli people of Polish-Jewish descent Hashomer Hatzair members Jewish partisans Jewish resistance members during the Holocaust Vilna Ghetto inmates Female resistance members of World War II Deaths from cancer in Israel Zionists